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What Is The Wayland Display Server & Its Protocol?

Phoronix: What Is The Wayland Display Server & Its Protocol?

While Kristian Høgsberg is now likely on his way to Toulouse, France for the 2010 X Developers' Summit, over the past day he has been working on some minor changes to the Wayland Display Server that he has now been working on for a while to leverage the latest Linux graphics technologies like kernel mode-setting and is something we initially reported on back in 2008 when it began...

How do the client apps talk to the server? is it in a way that could be over a network to a remote Wayland server if wanted? For things like ssh -X, and FreeNX...

Is the Window management/window decorations client side? If its client side, then that means Wayland users will see the same things windows users see when an app window hangs, or pops up a dialog, that being that they can't move the window.

Is the Window management/window decorations client side? If its client side, then that means Wayland users will see the same things windows users see when an app window hangs, or pops up a dialog, that being that they can't move the window.

Not sure if I got the concept of Wayland right, but wouldn't a window manager take care of that? Such as Compiz?

The way I got it, Wayland + Compiz would make a complete desktop environment, or have I missed something?

The way I got it, Wayland + Compiz would make a complete desktop environment, or have I missed something?

Yes, if Compiz ran on top of Wayland.

I'm not quite in favor of Wayland - the approach is too simplicistic in my opinion. It may be usable for some kind of embedded device, or a very small desktop environment, but nowadays X.Org can be compiled into a binary small enough to run on a mobile phones, and once Wayland starts implementing some advanced features the difference will become smaller and smaller.

Some features, like network transparency, are not even possible with Wayland. This is a huge step backwards. Some other projects are also abandoning network transparency in small steps, like KDE with the new notification area, but at least there are fallbacks in place.

Maybe it would be better to just rip out all those now-unnecessary features from X.Org and streamline the protocol a bit. Most applications use a library to wrap the protocol anyways, and if the effort was coordinated with the larger distributions over an extended timeframe noone would really notice.